You seem like somebody who has so much money to waste. The book drop rate is also good. People find x2-x3 books every event. And the whiskers must be. Or you'll find everyone has a raiment. Also there're alot of people already with the bkr. Me my self i have 2 and a bkm going to bkr. So no need to make those stuff. You dont find a book? Have that much of money? Just buy 1.

The original thread isn't about improving, it's about changing, let's not get mixed up

Seeing as improving drop rates is at most a 10 minute effort we're overpaying a lot here.

Translation as I read it: "People that have shiny things are special and I want to keep it difficult to get for everyone else"

(Note: Responses heavily rooted in opinion below.)

• Increasing drop rates would be an improvement. Rewards like these armor sets are supposed to feel tangible and let you see and keep track of your progress towards getting them, not having you pray to RNGesus, sacrifice your left lung and dedicate your life to planting fruit trees in impoverished nations.
• Increasing the spawn rate would be an improvement. Black Kats are fun to fight. They're fun to kill. Every time one is found, it brings with it that magic of "what if?" Seeing this pop up more would give it more life than simply "run this dungeon over and over and hope you find this one rare enemy for an even smaller chance of finding this book or something" where you end up turning off your brain to keep from losing your mind.
• Removing the whiskers from the crafting cost of the other kat sets, the things that are also used for the end-game armor set, would be an improvement. Why should something by all accounts inferior cost the exact same as the strongest version? It's like saying "Here, you can have this box that has your very own pet rock, or you can have this box that has a ticket redeemable for a solid gold pet rock. Both cost your firstborn. Choose wisely."
• Making whiskers obtainable with X amount of pages would be an improvement. It turns from a grind with no guarantee to giving you an actual end goal to work towards and to keep track of how far you've gotten. You get to sit back and go "well, I'm almost there. I did that. I did the thing!"

I already have the set. It's neat. It's black. It's kat.

However, I want other people to benefit. Other people who can't just buy their way into it. If they can't get the Black Kat set, I want them to be able to craft the other armors without feeling like they need to sell their limbs to science just to afford one piece.

Events are supposed to be fun; this is built to be frustrating.

You know what, you're right. I concede and offer you a cookie as a token of friendship. However, I will keep my post for others to pick apart and take what they will from it. Deal?

I've even added a note to it, as my views are not concrete "end all" for anything and I came off that way, so I apologize for that. Thank you for making me aware.

To be honest I'm fine with black kat being the hard to achieve end-game item. I'm not okay with kat claw, eye, and hiss being considered equally as end-game when the helmet is available at a reasonable price but the armor is so bonkers difficult to acquire. It doesn't really even do anything better than anything else in most circumstances. It's not a lot of damage, it's not a lot of attack speed/charge time, and it's alright on defense but not a whole lot better.

Basically claw, eye, and hiss are worthwhile to farm pages for, but not worthwhile to farm books for. Black kat is worthwhile to farm books for - I'm sure if chaos was locked behind a similar grindwall I would be saying "yes, it's good behind that wall". Letting us get the armors for their value back would be great.

As it stands I have the kat eye raiment, black kat raiment, kat hiss mail, and kat eye cloak. I plan to make them all 5* regardless of what happens, however they are a nice "in the middle" class armor that is crazy expensive. At this point the sacred grizzle shade armor is competitive if not an upgrade to the kat eye raiment, and it's achievable through crafting.

Plenty of people would get kat raiments if they were not so expensive. Since they are so expensive they only get the black kat one. I can count on one hand how many people I've seen wearing non-black kat raiments, however I couldn't tell you how many people have the black kat one. While I have spent a lot of time and resources making my raiments, it wouldn't hurt me personally if they were made easier to acquire. Black kat one should remain difficult regardless tho, it's pretty OP.

Another way to look at the other kat raiments' problem could be looking at maintaining them difficult to obtain but buffing them to a degree similar to that of the black set. Sure this would make the other kat helms look a bit awkward but this would also provide players with a meaningful choice when using their whiskers. Variety is cool.

Raiment solution: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/115426

Tell me what you think

"Events aren't supposed to be just fun"; we're glad you came back from the dead but you might wanna check that eye decay. And yes, the carrot at the end of the stick is what keeps players online for hours on end, and that's just what F2P games are meant to be like. And apart from the loud forums complaints everyone is doing just fine out there.

grinding a few days might give F2P players an item worth $50. Now how is that not F2P friendly.

Allowing your F2P players gain gears worth 50 bucks IRL in a few days with no credit card involved? That is a nail in the coffin for any MMO that doesn't want their whales to find ways to not spend money.

+1 to everything hippo just said, this is exactly what I meant by those arguments I had with Draycos all those years ago, these events are never meant be to candies that are been thrown around. Releasing massive amount of new content has never worked out for OOO (gunner update is the prime example of 'more content =/= good content), just because your make the content more available, it won't make it more fun, in fact, most of the time it is the opposite.

They're probably not worth that much anymore, assuming a Margrel spot is now 3k CE, the cost of any 5* raiment would be 18k CE which if bought directly from Grey Havens would cost about 45$. They've certainly been more expensive than that before, if anything that's an indication that they are far more available than they used to be and this thread is not acknowledging that.

Gunner update's changes were pretty rad. What it added wasn't so rad.

It changed magnuses to beautiful, made switchshooting more involved, gave autoguns a valid normal attack, and opened up many opportunities that we simply didn't have. Guns are so wonderfully expansive right now it makes even swords look unvaried.

However the armors were so convoluted and covered everything so awkwardly it just sort of made no set helpful. It's like gunner sets and specialist sets combined into something more specialist than gunner, and people don't really use the specialist sets often.

I guess the point I'm making is that black kat content isn't bad at all, it's just inaccessible or not worth the time currently. I'd rather have claw, eye, and hiss being easier to obtain and keep their current power (which is an "inbetween" class armor) than be more powerful but harder to obtain, however if we don't change the system changing the rewards would be the logical second step.

@Exerpa
A book can be sold for 20k E which costs $49.95. So in theory yes, its worth 50 dollars. (i.e you'd have to spend $50 to achieve the same result without grinding/making the money in game)

And yes I know they might not be worth exactly 20k right now that the event is going on but my point still stands.